Facebook is ready for your new closeup. Are you?

Worse, once users tried the apps, they were often unsatisfying.
"The most successful things were games, and that's not what
Facebook had in mind," says Joe Green, a former Facebooker who
co-founded Causes, one of the few major apps in that class that
didn't flame out. "There are all these areas of human life
that have not experienced the revolution of social," he says.
Now, he predicts, they will.

Facebook has plenty to offer those developers. So much so that
even social networks that have tried to compete with Facebook in
narrow ways have now decided to join up with the giant. "There are
35 million people on Facebook who have friend status with [the much
smaller number of] friends who are signed up on our application --
but many have not heard of us," says Travis Katz, the CEO of
Gogobot, a travel recommendation site. He expects that some of
those millions will discover his site when Facebook reports that
their friends have posted albums of their London trips, or tips on
Chicago restaurants.

Bill Nguyen, the CEO of Color -- a much touted social photo iPhone app that flopped on launch,
reworked his entire business plan after getting briefed on the Open
Graph. "When we started our business, we saw ourselves as a
Post-PC developer," he says "Now we're a Facebook
developer." He is hugely impressed at how Color's new
Facebook app can take advantage of all of the service's
features. (The app in question is a real-time video stream
from people's iPhones -- it allows people connected on Facebook to
participate in instant "visits" that lets them see the world from
the camera of the friend's iPhone.) "Today feels like the
first day of the iPhone," Nguyen says, anticipating a wave of
social apps just as significant as the mobile apps that Apple's
phone unleashed.

The second part of the equation how Facebook itself is changing
to accommodate the anticipated wave of new activity it will log
through those applications. Even before F8, Facebook announced a
series of new features or alterations in anticipation of today's
major news. Many of the familiar components of Facebook are going
to be different, and new ones will be added. The Newsfeed will be
now populated with a different mix of "stories" (Facebook's term
for those short items in the feed). "Lightweight" stories -- Joe
Blow friended Sally Smith -- appear in a stream called The Ticker.
Not so apparent yet is an alteration under the hood with smarter
algorithms, called "Graph Rank," that will allow new applications
to flourish without spammng the newsfeed so you won't get notified
every time one of your close friends listens to a song or works out
in the gym.

Friend Lists are also an important component. This is the
application that a lot of people have noticed is similar to the
Google+ Circles feature. A lot of people have noticed in the
last week that Facebook has been aggressively requesting them to
hone the list of their closest friends. This can be useful in the
same sense that Circles is -- helping them share personal items
with only those they trust. But while Google sees Circles
mainly as a filter that enables users to maintain privacy, Facebook
is using its close friends list as a launching pad for new
applications that let people share within a tighter social
circle. "It's perfect for us," says Dave Morin, who's now CEO
of Path, a mobile social app built for sharing only among a small
cohort. In another example, Causes will use the list to enable
people to dun their closest friends for contributions to their
favourite charities.

But the biggest shift, and what may be the most controversial,
centres on the Facebook profile. It not only will look
different -- a large cover picture (users pick it) makes it look
more like a stylish website than the bland resume of the original
-- but it serves a much deeper function.

"With the current profile, you look at my wall, you look
at my photos, you're done -- there's nothing else to do," says
Chris Cox, Facebook's VO of Product. He compares it to the
first five minutes with a stranger, when you simply find out the
basics about a person -- where they work, where they went to
school, who they know. Even the more extensive information that
Facebook has added over the years only adds up to five more minutes
of conversation, where you might learn what the person was been
doing very recently.